


leave all your love and your longing behind, you can't carry it with you if you  want to survive

by wearealltalesintheend



Series: Jason Todd Birhday Week 2018 [5]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst and Feels, Gen, Jason needs a hug, and possibly better role models, but what else is new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 09:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15704391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearealltalesintheend/pseuds/wearealltalesintheend
Summary: "Jason doesn’t die in Ethiopia.He’s beaten, and bloodied, and broken. But he doesn’t die. He crawls all over the dirty warehouse floor, desert sand grinding against every wound, grating raw flesh. He leaves a red trail behind him, all the way to the door. Then, it gets on the doorknob, the metal, the wood.The Joker never locked the door. He never thought he would have to. He saw Jason lying broken on the warehouse floor, and laughed.But here’s the thing, broken doesn’t mean dead."or, alternatively, Jason survives Ethiopia, and what happens after.





	leave all your love and your longing behind, you can't carry it with you if you  want to survive

Jason doesn’t die in Ethiopia.

 

He’s beaten, and bloodied, and broken. But he doesn’t die. He crawls all over the dirty warehouse floor, desert sand grinding against every wound, grating raw flesh. He leaves a red trail behind him, all the way to the door. Then, it gets on the doorknob, the metal, the wood.

 

The Joker never locked the door. He never thought he would have to. He saw Jason lying broken on the warehouse floor, and  _ laughed. _

 

But here’s the thing, broken doesn’t mean dead.

 

When the warehouse goes up in flames, an angry red-orange-yellow licking towards the sky, Jason isn’t inside. The explosion throws him like a ragdoll against the sand dunes, and the impact replaces the air on his lungs with fire. 

 

The desert sky is a merciless blue.

 

Jason closes his eyes, and then nothing.

 

*

 

He wakes up a week later.

 

_ An induced coma, _ the doctors say,  _ to help him heal _ . Jason looks down at the white bandages, at the white sheets, at the white walls. It smells like hospitals always do. Everything about this place is just like hospitals always do.

 

Bruce is sitting on a plastic chair when Jason wakes up. He had found him soon after the explosion, he says.  _ I thought you were dead _ , he says.

 

That’s fair, Jason thought that, too.

 

There’s a lot of drugs on his system, and Jason feels nothing at all. He floats on morphine clouds, and even still, his ribs ache in a dull reminder.  _ You almost died _ , they say,  _ why didn’t you? _

 

Jason asks about the warehouse, about the Joker, about Sheila. Bruce hesitates, but Jason figures it’s best to get everything out of the way as soon as possible. 

 

So Bruce tells him. He tells him about rushing to the nearest hospital, about Superman stopping the Joker somewhere in the UN, he isn’t sure, about rushing Jason back to Gotham as soon as he was stable. 

 

As it turns out, Jason survived Ethiopia, but Sheila didn’t.

 

He thinks it should hurt more, he thinks it should  _ feel _ more. But morphine, and all.

 

*

 

The nightmares follow him wherever he goes.

 

It doesn’t matter where he falls asleep. The couch, the bed, the loveseat, the floor. 

 

Laughter echoes all around him, bouncing off wooden walls. It mocks him, it pulls him under, it tastes like sand.

 

Sometimes he wakes up screaming, but most nights he wakes up with aching lungs and a lump on his throat. 

 

He doesn’t tell Bruce that, but he knows that the man knows. The bags under Jason’s eyes spell it enough for a layman’s eye, for Bruce’s, they probably sing a symphonie.

 

The nightmares follow him wherever he goes, so Jason learns how to welcome them. He closes his eyes, expects the laughing, the giggling, the fire lapping at his skin, a phantom limb of a wound that sometimes– sometimes, he fears will never properly heal. So he learns to embrace the dark, and the demons snarling with laughter on their canines, for the reminder they are.  _ He survived, Sheila died, the Joker won.  _

 

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? In the end even if only one of them lost, that means the Joker won.

 

*

 

Recovering is the hardest thing.

 

His legs hurt like fire, catching. It spreads all the way up his spine and around his arms every time his feet touch the floor. At the end of the day, he feels burned down to a blackened coal.

 

Still, Jason’s stubborn. That’s something the Joker can’t take away from him, so he soldiers on. He feels the fire, grips the bars with white-knuckled hands, and takes the next step, and the next, and the next. 

 

It doesn’t get easier, it takes him what feels like years until he can say his body is healed. Time is relative, and each day feels like forever. 

 

The nightmares are a different story, a different wound. He doesn’t give up on it, but he isn’t holding his breath either. Jason’s resigned, and he promises himself not to let it stop him. His dreams might be on fire, but Jason’s not. He survived. 

 

_ He survived,  _ and that’s what matters.

 

*

 

Sometimes Jason thinks he might have left more than spilled blood on that warehouse in Ethiopia.

 

He’s not sure what, exactly. 

 

But sometimes–  _ sometimes. _

 

*

 

After the warehouse, after the Joker,  _ after, _ things are never the same.

 

Bruce gets harsher. He doesn’t want Jason out on the streets anymore, and Jason can see why, but he can’t help but wonder if this isn’t just an excuse. 

 

Because Bruce  _ fired  _ him before.

 

Jason may have left the house on his own volition, but he was kicked out of the job. So he can’t help but  _ wonder. _

 

And the fights, they don’t help. They fight all the time. 

 

Because Bruce still thinks Jason is too reckless, and too violent, and too stubborn.  _ Too much.  _ And Jason, well. He can’t understand why should they leave that clown walking around after everything, after all that he proved himself capable of. The Joker was willing to kill a  _ teenager.  _ A  _ child.  _ He tried to blow up the  _ UN _ . 

 

When will it end? If they don’t draw a line now, if they don’t push back after this, then when?

 

When do they say  _ this is too far? _

 

He asks Bruce that, but Bruce only clenches his jaw and says Jason is too emotionally involved to judge, he says they can be jury, judge, and executioner. He says Jason doesn’t understand.

 

It sounds like a broken record, screeching and grating and awfully loud.

 

But he’s right. Jason looks at the crime ratings rising, and he doesn’t understand at all.

 

*

 

Jason is sixteen and a half, and the fights are only getting worse.

 

He still doesn’t get it, but now he’s not sure he’ll ever will.

 

Jason isn’t sure if that’s a bad thing, too.

 

*

 

When they fight, shouting from across the Cave, Jason feels his anger burning hotter than any forest fire.

 

It leaves his throat aching, bleeding, until his voice is too hoarse for anything above a whisper.

 

Alfred never waits for them downstairs anymore, unless someone is hurting. He knows they will be arguing before they even turn off the engine.

 

Jason thinks he understands Dick a little better now, why he clings to Bludhaven and refuses to crawl back to Gotham. They’ll never be friends, he thinks, but he understands, now.

 

He thinks a lot of things, these days.

 

*

 

This time he doesn’t wait for Bruce to fire him. 

 

He waits until the man is asleep, zips a duffel bag, leaves his Robin uniform on his bed, and climbs down his window.

 

The night is clear, and the moon is full, and when Jason walks out of Wayne Manor, he doesn’t look back.

 

The porch light is on, and the shadows follow him all the way down the road and into the city.

 

*

 

Finding a cheap apartment isn’t hard. He had saved some money, and it’s summer. Odd jobs are easy to get by.

 

Bruce gives him a week of silence. Jason figures the man thought he would be back by then.

 

Jason has no interest in coming back. Call it irreconcilable differences, call it  _ I had to leave before I hated you. I don’t wanna hate you. _

 

On the eighth night Batman lands on his firescape, silent and hiding on the shadows. Jason shakes his head, closes the window with a dull thud, turn off all the lights.

 

He closes his bedroom door, dives under the thin covers. He doesn’t cry, but he’s barely seventeen, and he’s never felt so alone. Jason tells himself it’s for the best, reminds himself he’s been alone before, he’s survived worst. 

 

_ He’s survived worst.  _

 

Jason had expected Bruce to press, to push, to fight. Instead, by the time morning rolls around, his firescape is empty. Jason moves to a new apartment the next day. Batman doesn’t come back.

 

*

 

_ It’s for the best. _

 

*

 

On the twelfth night Jason zips his jacket, puts on the red helmet over his head. Looking at the mirror, he can’t recognize himself. 

 

That’s good, that means he can be anything at all.

 

_ Red Hood _ . 

 

It sounds harsh under the artificial light, it sounds like a gun going off. It rolls off the tongue like cigarette smoke, and Jason tastes sand.

 

That’s good. This isn’t supposed to be pleasant

 

Jason is seventeen, he’s young, and he knows he’s not going to change the world. But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try, one damned soul at a time.

 

*

 

Jason survives Ethiopia, and it changes everything.

 

*

 

_ It doesn’t change anything at all. _

 

*

 

**Author's Note:**

> hey you made it! if you liked it, maybe leave a kudo or a comment? Those seriously make my day!
> 
> or, you can come talk to me on [my tumblr](http://wearealltalesintheend.tumblr.com/)
> 
> and hey? thanks.


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